The Usefulness of Waste: Filth and Waste in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. and George Gissing's The Nether World.

Transcription

1 The Usefulness of Waste: Filth and Waste in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend and George Gissing's The Nether World by Alison Bangerter A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Approved April 2012 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee: Daniel Bivona Ronald Broglio Mark Lussier ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY May 2012

2 ABSTRACT Victorian London was often confronted with the filth and waste that was the result of urban civilization. The Victorians saw themselves as a race of humanity above the savage tribes. While steps were taken to repress these natural and instinctual products of humanity, human waste and filth were powerfully incorporated in the fictional writings of Charles Dickens and George Gissing. I argue that this incorporation of filth and waste in both Our Mutual Friend and The Nether World serves as a metaphorical statement on the living conditions of the Victorian lower class. Using the urban travelogues of Dickens and Gissing's contemporaries, along with the analysis on waste and filth done by Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, I argue that the interpretation of waste by Dickens and Gissing define a permeable boundary between London's residuum and the rest of urban society. Oftentimes, the definition of waste and filth become intermixed with the defintion of value and money. While Dickens chooses to focus on an optimistic outcome of the use value of waste; Gissing sees no hopeful future for the inhabitants of London's slums. I argue that Dickens, throughout his novel, showcases a modernistic use value for the waste of civilization through the recycleable qualities of waste. Gissing, in opposistion to Dickens' optimisim, sees a more fatalistic future for civilization. Both novels are able to provide a blueprint for the future of urban society, by establishing that filth and waste is a unifying element of civilization, and by establishing the important role that filth can play within the value system of Victorian London. i

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION OUR MUTUAL FRIEND THE NETHER WORLD CONCLUSION REFERENCES ii

4 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In his book The Ghost Map: The Story of London s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, Steven Johnson describes London in 1854 as a city of scavengers [whose] names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men [and] shoremen (Johnson 2). These scavengers were profiting industrially from the waste of society and were members of London s working underclass. They made up a large percentage of the city s population and contributed greatly to the commercial market. London s citizens were trying to make do with an Elizabethan public infrastructure in a world that was becoming more industrialized in the years before The Great Stink of London in 1858 (Johnson 4). The Great Stink of 1858, in response to this convergence of the preand post-production of waste, created an organic problem that brought the issue of waste removal to the forefront of Victorian sanitation reform. The middle-class members of London s population did not become as heavily involved with the eradication of filth and stink until The Great Stink of London refers to the overpowering smell of human waste that permeated the air of London. The Great Stink also included the effects that a flawed water sanitation system had on cleanliness that was caused by unusually dry summer weather (Barnes 15). Previous to the reform of London s sanitation system (in the 1830s and 40s), the human waste of the city s inhabitants was dumped into the river Thames and numerous cesspits that developed throughout London. Since the 1

5 water source for many of the middle-class and aristocracy s homes was the Thames, a cycle began that returned the waste previously dumped into the river back into the water that was used for daily household activities which included bathing, drinking, and cooking (Chadwick 83). Edwin Chadwick helped to stoke the fascination that Victorians had with sanitation when he published his report The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Populations in The result of society s growing obsession with reforming sanitary conditions was the realization that the city needed to create and enforce regulations that dealt with the problem of waste and filth. The growing problem of waste and filth was an inevitable production of city life. Victorians, seeing themselves as a race of humanity above the savage tribes that were presented in magazines and newspapers, began to develop expectations regarding the level of cleanliness that was required by upper and middle-class populations. The Great Stink and the outbreaks of disease that occurred as a result of poor sanitation created a modern notion of sanitation that became associated with the removal of waste from the center of the city. Sigmund Freud later studied and expounded on these changing ideologies that occurred in the Victorian era. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Freud observed that the roots of civilization rested in these expectations. The midpoint of the nineteenth century saw the inhabitants of London expecting to see the signs of cleanliness and order (Freud 46). Urban civilization developed into a place where dirtiness of any kind [became] incompatible with society s increasing obsession with sanitation (Freud 46). As a result, the Victorians began to fixate on the repression 2

6 of all that was considered to be disgusting and filthy. The regulation of sanitary conditions that appeared in the Victorian era was successful in affecting the physical appearance of the city streets. The waste from the neighborhoods of the upper and middle class was deposited in the low-income neighborhoods. The physical removal of waste added to the growing psychological repression of filth. The upper and middle-class members of Victorian society began to see the psychological importance of repressing excretion and the importance of its physical removal from the more affluent sections of the city. Freud saw the psychological repression of filth in psychoanalytical terms and was not surprised by the idea of setting up the use of soap as an actual yardstick of civilization (Freud 46). A footnote from Freud s Civilization and Its Discontents, added after the initial publication of his work, describes the importance of excrement to the repression of humanity s natural instinct for pleasure. Freud explains that the incitement to cleanliness originates in an urge to get rid of the excreta (Freud 54). The progression of Nineteenth-Century society to develop a physical and psychological obsession with cleanliness and the massive efforts made to abolish filth and waste led to the existence of excrement becoming a newly heightened ensitivity that was offensive to civilization s senses. Freud believed that the ideology of organic repression only finds itself concerned with the excreta of others and that man does not find his own excreta repulsive, but only that of other people, despite the developmental advances of humanity (Freud 54). The view that humanity is destined to develop upwardly was popular to the Victorians, who subscribed to a doctrine of 3

7 inevitable progress. Freud observes that the concept of filth, and its conceptualization by individual members of society, is not always associated with a negative connotation. The concepts of revulsion and disgust, brought on by the moral repression of filth in Victorian society, are mediated through a social system. The sanitation reform that resulted from The Great Stink had a profound effect on the ways that filth and waste were psychologically appropriated by society. Norman O. Brown expounded on Freud s theory regarding the natural instinct of excretion of waste. Humanity can experience pleasure from the act of excreting their filth, and must be taught that their own excreta is disgusting. According to Brown, sublimation changes both the aim and the object of the instinct (Brown 138). More so than in previous centuries, Victorians became affected by the repression of natural instinct and the negative connotation that developed as a result. Brown saw this effort towards sublimation as a fight occurring principally within the psyche of the subject, one that could have a possible impact on the relationship between individual and society (Brown 139). The fact that the waste ended up in the slums succeeded in enhancing the divide between rich and poor. Brown, and also to an extent Charles Dickens in Our Mutual Friend, sees the satirical elements that arose from such a concept. Freud exposes the disbalance in the human organism between higher and lower functions of a bodily nature that exists among the high and low of an urban population as well (Brown 187). Freud and Brown saw the growing gap between natural instinct and the repression of excreta as a sign of cultural modernity 4

8 . The middle class s interactions with filth and excreta production was explored in the literature of the nineteenth century. British novelists, as well as French writers like Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, began to explore a propitious conjunction of literal and metaphorical filth (Cohen vii). When used as a way to explore the relationship between the upper and lower classes, through the production and redistribution of human waste, Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend (published serially in ) explored the redeeming and damning, sometimes comedic, elements of London sanitation. The end of the nineteenth century saw the filthy waste-covered slums of London s population as no longer a source of comedic characters. Literature continued to compensate for the death of Dickens and new novelists explored the failings of society to take care of its poor. George Gissing s novel The Nether World (published in 1889) explored the bleak world inhabited by London s residuum. The characters of Gissing s novel were denied the hope of upward mobility that Dickens gave to some of his characters and instead his novel represented the fatalistic views of its author. Gisssing saw no point to charitable reform or middle-class philanthropy. In The Nether World the poor were trapped in the slums. Dickens saw human excrement as an equalizing part of humanity that transgressed the boundaries between upper and lower class. Gissing s fatalism configured the idea of filth and human waste as one identifier of class hierarchy. In Gissing s The Nether World, the slums are places of filth and therefore irredeemable. 5

9 Populations of people create waste and the act of its disposal is a common development of civilization. The human production of waste serves as a common element between the lower and upper classes of London society and when combined with the psychological response that contact with human waste invokes, this response of disgust can serve as the psychic equivalent of the [wall between Self and Other] in its ability to exclude those influences judged to be more damaging than beneficial (Miller, Susan 191). The middle-class of Dickens and Gissing s novels possess the ability to remove their waste from sight and the inhabitants of the city s slums have no other choice but to live amongst both their own waste and accept the waste of those socially higher than themselves. Dickens and Gissing explore the various ways that the disposal of waste can effect both the people that profit from it and those forgotten and overlooked lower classes of London that were forced by poverty to live among the waste of their betters. 6

10 CHAPTER 2 OUR MUTUAL FRIEND Dickens and Gissing wrote and published their novels at different times during the Victorian era. Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend was written immediately after the effects of sanitation reform were beginning to manifest on a psychological level. Our Mutual Friend describes a city of London that is covered in dust and fog. Dickens city is an animate London, with smarting eyes, and irritated lungs and this London becomes a sooty specter, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and in so being wholly neither (Dickens 420). Through the foggy air, London s gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest nature (Dickens 420). Dickens gives special attention to the distinct nature of London fog compared to the fog of the surrounding English countryside. London fog is different due to its elemental contribution of human filth and excreta. The fog in the city was at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the city [it] was rusty-black (Dickens 420). The description of the gradient of air quality draws attention to the dichotomous relationship that exists between life in the slums and the lives of London s middle class; between the visible and the invisible inhabitants of London. Dickens draws a metaphorical line between the poor and the middle class in Our Mutual Friend through literal depictions of waste and filth. Overall in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens presents the production of waste and society s creation of filth as unifying elements of mankind that cross over London s class boundaries. 7

11 Characters like Mr. Boffin fluctuate under the pressures placed on them by this mobility. Mr. Boffin becomes the Golden Dustman and functions as an object lesson for Bella on the miserly and corrupting nature that money can awaken in an individual. Dickens pays special attention to the various laboring characters of this novel, often exemplifying them with the characteristics of Henry Mayhew s social narratives. The dustman is one of those professional middle class careers that takes a prominent place in the plot of Our Mutual Friend. John Harmon s father is a member of the professional middle class and a visible member of London society. Harmon has gained this position through his successful Dust business. The elder Harmon, who is deceased by the beginning of this novel, is the professional overlord of a very successful dust collecting business. The dustmen that work under him were an invisible but very important part of Victorian London s desire for control over the city s production of filth. In addition to Dickens fiction, many journalists like Mayhew and Greenwood explored the lives of the residuum. James Greenwood, a social explorer during the nineteenth century who published extensively on the conditions of London s poor, observed that the dustmen of London performed an eminently useful service since the inhabitants of the city were guilty of not having troubled ourselves [at all] in their concerns (Greenwood 116). Greenwood wrote of his experience of being invited to a tea-party that was thrown for the city s employed dustmen and described the affair as an experimental gathering (Greenwood 116). Greenwood observed that the job of dustman was one of the most disgusting and degrading, 8

12 if not the most disgusting and degrading application of [labour] (Greenwood 118). Dickens, in contrast to Mayhew, saw the dustmen as more than merely distinct members of a separate tribe of humanity but instead celebrated their humanity and individuality. The profession of dustmen and the disposal and redistribution of waste was work that often found the dustman represented as a cultural hero [who was] also present as a dirty, threatening, uncivilized, irredeemable proletarian vulgarian (Maidment 7). Despite the nature of the Dustman s job, most were members of the middle class and successful enough to afford comfortable living conditions. According to Henry Mayhew s observations of the dust trade, the persons [together with a plot of waste ground whereon to deposit the refuse] that collect the waste were called dust-contractors, and are generally men of considerable wealth (Mayhew 219). Mayhew breaks down the various stages and processes of the dust trade while also establishing the dustman s labor value as big business in the city of London. Mayhew describes these characters with a comedic charm that Dickens must have found appealing in his creation of Our Mutual Friend s lowerclass personalities. Mayhew found the industrious poor a thousand-fold more veracious than the trading rich (Mayhew 222). Dustmen and mudlarks existed in a special place among the middle classes of London as a result of their deplorable working conditions. These mud-larks, or river-finders, are about the most deplorable in their appearance (Mayhew 209). Like the dustmen, the mud-larks were a London phenomenon, and they belonged to a group of trades that collectively took responsibility for public cleanliness and convenience 9

13 (Maidment 14). It is a sign of industry that mankind can find a way to turn the basest of human production into gold. Freud finds that civilization s valuation of gold is directly related to its repression of filth and human excrement (Freud 187). The dust that existed in London during the nineteenth century had value as a commercial enterprise and existed as an industry for the poor laborer. Dickens also showcased this assertion within his novel and satirized the exchange economy by making filth and money interchangeable. Mayhew is specific in his description of the elemental component of the term dust. Unlike the mud-lark and his (or her) concern for the treasure to be found among the various waste products of civilization, the dust that is collected from the streets and homes of London s upper and middle-class population is not made up of human excreta. Mayhew describes the dustmen s main laborious concern as being the emptying and collecting of dustbins filled with the residual production of coal fires (Mayhew 218). Dickens incorperates the distinct profession of a mud-lark or waterman elsewhere in Our Mutual Friend and implies that the dust that contributes to Harmon s financial success is comprised of both ashes and human waste. The London described in the novel, is at its worst. Such a black shrill city, combining the qualities of a smoky house and a scolding wife; such a gritty city; such a hopeless city (Dickens 145). Dickens wishes to present to his reading audience a sensory image of London as a city that is covered in layers of its own excremental production. Dickens Boffin is the fictional embodiment of the dustman. Mayhew, in his urban travelogue among the residuum of London society, makes the distinction 10

14 between dust and human waste. Despite Mayhew s observational statements about the profession, it remains unclear whether the dustmen of Victorian England were involved in the disposal of human ordure as well as household waste (Maidment 11). Literary critics such as Stephen Gill claim that in view of the symbolic significance of the dust in the novel, it is highly likely that Dickens meant to conflate both in human organic waste (Gill 897). I would argue that Gill s opinion of the inclusion of human excrement in Dickens version of Dust is the correct way to read the composition of Dust in the novel. Dickens conveys to his reading audience the humorous connection of Dust and the poorer class s relation to upper-class London society. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, in their book The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, argue that the nineteenth century city was organized around the binary of filth/cleanliness (Stallybrass and White 136). Dickens problematizes this relationship between filth and cleanliness by making the waste in Our Mutual Friend an embodiment of both concepts. It becomes the commercial aspect of the waste that is representative of society s filth and the idea of cleanliness remains an unattainable ideal. By the conclusion of Dickens novel, the Dust of London is realized as an element that each thing contains both the principle and its opposite, that there exists no binary relationship between the clean upper-class and the filthy lower-class, and that through the production of waste man is revealed in his earthiness as eternally, hopelessly soiled (Laporte 34). The London that Dickens describes in Our Mutual Friend includes the Dust as being an inescapable element of city life. The inclusion of excrement as a property of 11

15 Dust extends into Dickens satirical commentary on the filthiness of gold and gold as dust. The character of the dustman in Our Mutual Friend is not concerned with whether or not the dust of London contains the excreta of humanity. The Dust would have contained some form of excremental element (most likely horse or other animal feces). Despite some clear historical references to the separation of dust and human excrement, Henry Mayhew observed in London Labor and the London Poor that the dustmen, scavengers, and nightmen are, to a certain extent, the same people (Mayhew 172). Mayhew consolidates the ambiguous nature of dust in his description of the London mud-lark. Under the general descriptive title of savengers and cleaners, the mud-larks are grimed with the foul soil of the river, and their torn garments stiffened up like boards with the dirt of every possible description (Mayhew 209). The professional endeavors of the mud-lark encompass all manner of poor, including women and children. Dickens uses Mayhew s descriptions of mud-larks, in addition to his description of dustmen, to create the industrious characters of Our Mutual Friend. Mudlarking and the job performed by the city s dustmen share common elements since these lines of work involve the re-appropriation of the city s waste products. The work of the dustman is depicted by Mayhew as being a noble profession. In contrast, the work of the mudlark is paradoxically necessary and deplorable. Dickens combines elements from both professions in his depiction of London s sanitation workers in Our Mutual Friend. 12

16 John Harmon is Dickens connection between London s visible and invisible peoples. Harmon is responsible for bringing the waste of society to the attention of the upper classes. Both these classes live among waste, but the upper class has the ability to turn excrement to gold while the lower class lives with the discarded waste of civilization. This is an important satiric element in the novel that shows the comical effects resulting from a profit through filth and waste of others. The reader s attention is drawn to the idea that dust has an economical value during the nineteenth century. John Harmon, the main protangonist in Our Mutual Friend, is heir to the fortune his father amassed by reclaiming the city s waste and turning it into financial profit. Harmon s father is known as a man who made his money by Dust among the upper class of Dickens novel (Dickens 13). Mortimer, in his description of Harmon s father and his career as a Dust contractor, describes him as living in a hilly country entirely composed of Dust (13). John Harmon s father lived his life through the appropriation and redistribution of Dust eventually using an immense amount of Dust for his daughter s dowery (Dickens 13). Everything about Harmon s life rested on the importance of waste and its re-appropriation into money. The Harmon s financial success is the result of recycling Dust comprised of filth [that] was rotten, decomposing waste, especially animal and human waste, and most especially feces (Gilbert 78). When put into more modern and simplistic terms, Harmon s life was built on shit and his daughter s dowry consisted of piles of shit. It appears that Dickens hope was for his readers to embrace the humor of this situation and realize the ecological truth of excrement becoming financially useful. 13

17 Bella Wilfer is one of the novel s redeemed characters. She has seen the damaging effects that greed has on an individual by the conclusion of the novel. Bella becomes a domestic cherub humbled by the negative effects of wealth evoked through Boffin (Dickens 454). The result of this personal reflection of character is that Bella is able to graciously accept her place as John Harmon s bride. Bella confesses to her father that she saw how terrible the fascination of money is and renounces the real filth of Dickens novel (Dickens 460). Instead of resigning herself to be an object of pride to Boffin and his wife, Bella seizes on her own self worth. She becomes a selfless and domesticated young woman instead of the selfish girl that existed before she encountered the negative effects of wealth on Boffin. Her newfound ability to put herself to work, in contrast to her previous yearning for unearned wealth, is crucial to the novel and the importance placed on performing labor. Her family observes this change in her and says with surprise that Miss Bella condescends to cook (Dickens 453). The scene of Bella cooking for her family is an example of Bella finding her worth as a member of her family. The result of taking her place among domestic labor is that Bella is able to elevate herself from being waste to achieving her own value as gold. This returns us to one of the main protagonists of Our Mutual Friend, the servant Nicodemus Boffin. Boffin is a man unpolished and uneducated, who exemplifies the myth of the Golden Dustman (Dickens 48). I ve previously discussed how the profession of dustmen was observed by Henry Mayhew in his writings on the London working poor in 1850 and the ways it was appropriated by 14

18 Dickens for narrative effect. From a historical perspective, the Victorian dustmen were considered figures of outstanding interest and importance, with distinctive cultural history of their own which was distinct from other trades (Maidment 4). The dustman was not inferior in intelligence to the brute creation (Greenwood 124).The distinct cultural history of the dustman concerned both the physical as well as the metaphorical. The dustman represented an embodiment of the elemental particles of civilization and thus [they were] binding together the literal and incommoding presence of dust on the streets of the metropolis with deeper meanings [which] figure dust as the symbolic fabric of life and death (Maidment 2). Boffin, in his new role as the Golden Dustman, pretends to beome a tragic miser for the purpose of teaching Bella the damaging effect caused by gold. Bella observes that every day he changes for the worse and for the worse [...] Before my eyes he grows suspicious, capricious, hard, tyrannical, unjust. If ever a good man was ruined by good fortune, it is my benefactor (Dickens 460). The tragic effects of the accumulation of wealth become intertwined with the dust mounds of Our Mutual Friend. The entanglement of the dust mounds with the accumulation of wealth is meant to teach Bella the effects that wealth can have on personal character. Boffin s charade is successful in demonstrating that unearned wealth does have a powerful negative effect on even the simplest of characters. Dickens keeps the charade of Boffin a secret from the audience, unlike the manipulation of Harmon. The result is that Dickens is able to effectively demonstrate the same lesson about money to his readers as well as to Bella. 15

19 The dustman in Our Mutual Friend seem to derive from a particular set of Mid-Victorian imperatives which include the wish to celebrate the technological feats and collective responsibility shown by Victorian management and re-use of waste (Maidment 13). The useful properties of waste give it value and make excrement a valuable commodity. The introduction of the audience to Boffin is a scene of comical self-improvement. Boffin is attempting to hire Silas Wegg to come to his house and read him poetry. Boffin wishes to become a better educated and more literate man despite being plagued by his current educational station. It is apparent that Dickens has created a situation of comical proportions and that both Wegg and Boffin are illiterate members of the lower class. When Wegg arrives at the home of Boffin, called Boffin s Bower, the reader is treated to a description of the charming spot of the successful dustman (Dickens 57). Boffin describes his home among the mounds of Dust as a spot to find out the merits of, little by little, and a new [one] every day (Dickens 57). Dickens incorporates the social observations of Greenwood in these descriptions of a home in the dust heaps. These dust heaps are no cesspits or dismal swamps (Dickens 213). Boffin regards the dust heaps as symbols of life and industry. The dust heaps symbolize Boffin s life and industry and he observes that home would look but a poor dead flat without the mounds (Dickens 185). Boffin visualizes himself as a pretty fair scholar in the dust (Dickens 185). Dickens endorses Boffin s pride as he surveys the view from his house. The reader, by paying attention to the lofty views that the Golden Dustman has from atop the dust heaps, can understand the pride of a profession based on turning excrement into gold. 16

20 Following his established comedic style, Dickens characterizes Boffin as a man who lives disillusioned about his place within society. Following the meeting between Wegg and Boffin, Boffin becomes the legal heir to the Harmon fortune. The inheritance of the Harmon dust mounds occurs after the alleged body of Harmon s son John is fished out of the Thames by Gaffer. Boffin has become the heir to mounds and mounds of Harmon s Dust. To the middle class lawyer Mr. Lightwood, the Dust heaps that Harmon has left to Boffin amount to nothing and metaphorically Boffin has inherited the waste of civilization. Lightwood is able to see excrement as an elemental component of the invisible London. Boffin sees the inheritance as a great lot to take care of, undermining the upper class s notion that the profession of waste recycling and removal is of little importance after it has been swept from view (Dickens 89). Dickens uses the inheritance and its monetary importance to several of the novel s characters as a fictional way to show interest in the immense wealth represented by dustheaps (Maidment 23). In order to solidify the economic importance of the dustmen, Boffin embodies the ideal of a Golden Dustman. Dickens uses the Golden Dustman to satirize the excreta of London s society being recycled into monetary compensation. Dickens use of the imagery of waste exemplifies the lower classes relationship to the upper class through the concept of a lower-class Self set against the upper-class Other by organic waste. It is not just human waste that makes up the components of Dust but this strongly implied element prevails in the interpretation of Dickens Dust. Cast out by London society to live side-by-side with the waste of civilization, the city s residuum became equated with the 17

21 sensory response of disgust. The ambiguity that surrounds the sensory response of disgust needs to be taken into account by the reader. Our Mutual Friend invokes a disgusting response from its reading audience despite the fact the London s residuum did not express disgust with their own conditions of life. Disgust has already been described as an ambiguous emotion. Dickens uses elements of disgust for comedic effect and in Our Mutual Friend laughing at something [is] an act of repulsion, resembles in itself the act of rejecting (Menninghaus 11). Theorists like Winfried Menninghaus regard the emotion of disgust as a symptom of modernity (Menninghaus 9). The city of London embraced industry and the growing importance placed on capitalism and labor. At the same time that London was embracing modernity, the city also began to desire the removal of filth from the center of the city. The filth and waste from the streets began to disappear as London s upper classes desired its removal from their close vicinity. Menninghaus claims that this move toward the repression of filth put London on a trajectory toward a more modern city (Menninghaus 84). Freud claimed that the incitement to cleanliness originates in an urge to get rid of the excreta, which have become disagreeable to the sense perceptions (Freud 54). Civilization, according to Freud, moves forward in advancement while at the same time a person who is not clean - who does not hide his excreta - is offending other people (Freud 55). It is this categorization of disgust that creates zones which define what is meant when we use the term civilized society. The inhabitants of London s slum neighborhoods, despite their attempts to be both clean and fashionable, were still considered to be tainted by the filthy 18

22 qualities of human waste. Gaffer, whose profession requires him to profit off the most significant of human waste -- the corpse -- is described by Dickens as half savage [...] with such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the mud that begrimed his boat (Dickens 2). Gaffer is not simply filth as he possesses a business-like usage in his steady gaze (Dickens 2). Gaffer s profession is meant to provoke disgust from the reader and the profiting from dead bodies can signify the end of life and consciousness of another, [just as] they remind us of the possibility of such a state for oneself (Miller, Susan 188). The corpse is an important physical object in Dickens novel. The corpse in an object that represents satirical elements in Our Mutual Friend at the same time that it symbolizes the seriousness evident in profiting from mankind s waste. The corpse has value as recyclable material in the Victorian era because it represents the dual nature of filth and human waste. The corpse forces society to come to terms with a desire to repress all the waste products of a civilization as excreta and therefore useless matter. Mankind finds itself unwilling to dismiss the corpse so quickly if it represents a loved one, therefore suggesting that man is comfortable around some of his own waste products. In a different category than human excrement, which is only repulsive for its abject quality of connection with the living, the waste that is a corpse produces a much higher psychological response. Freud saw the powerful emotions of confronting waste as problematic. Man appears to be fascinated by the waste he produces, yet repulsed when confronted with the waste of his neighbor. The repulsion seems to grow when the waste matter in question is a dead body. Julie 19

23 Kristeva, in her book Powers of Horror, explores the concept of the corpse as cesspool and death (Kristeva 3). The corpse is an object of abjection, with no useful qualities other than to show what is permanently thrust aside in order to live (Kristeva 3). Our Mutual Friend is able to show the financial usefulness that can be produced out of the corpse which becomes not merely a border that has encroached upon everything but a usable object of sustainability for the living (Kristeva 3). Dickens is not removed from the symbolic system that the corpse without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects (Kristeva 3). The corpses in Our Mutual Friend re-integrate into the system. They are, by virtue of just being corpses and not the waste of the people they once were, useful as a waste product. the corpse is used for comedic and economical effect by Mr. Venus in the form of human skeletal remains. All of the characters in Our Mutual Friend traffic in dust and waste. It is part of their human condition to be intimately associated with Dust (Metz 71). It is only Gaffer that is shown making his living off of a corpse. There is a distinction to be made here as Dickens seems to show the hierarchy that separates human waste and the dead. This presentation of labor hierarchy among the industrious poor allows Dickens to subvert the separation with the inner nobility of Gaffer s daughter Lizzie. Mortimer claims that there is no better girl in all this London than Lizzie Hexam (Dickens 294). Lizzie, by the end of Our Mutual Friend, has become a symbol of humanity s good qualities regardless of her upbringing as the daughter of a London waterman. Lizzie is a counterpart to Bella 20

24 and serves as Dickens glimmer of hope for the redemptive qualities of the residuum. The abject concept of a corpse and Gaffer s profession as waterman are important to the plot of Our Mutual Friend because of the connection it has to the Thames river. The Thames plays an important role in the novel. Our Mutual Friend opens on the Thames as the reader is first shown the professional pursuits of Gaffer which establishes the novel s concern with the financial gain of waste disposal. The river Thames metaphorically represents the waste and filth that flows through London. The river covers Gaffer s boat with a layer of slime and ooze, which results in affecting everything that comes in contact with its filthy nature as being placed in a sodden state (Dickens 1). In the fictional narrative of Our Mutual Friend, the river serves as a location to distinguish the good from the bad. The dumping ground of both human filth and dead bodies, the river is also the place of much of the action involving the evil character of Riderhood and the birth place of John Harmon s false identities in the novel. Harmon s identity is an important plot in the novel and his rebirth from the Thames leads him to renounce his old identity in order to take on false identies. The Thames ultimately becomes the physical location for Harmon s rebirth. The river is important to the overall commentary that Dickens provides for the current social state of London; the Thames is [transformed] into the primary site of London filth and a symbol of the dangers of uncontained fluids (Gilbert 90). Gilbert refers to this fear of the abject as un-contained bodily fluids as being a fictional manifestation of the leaky body (Gilbert 81). Her theory of a Victorian fear of unrestrained human 21

25 waste and its metaphorical representation in the disgusting waters of the Thames helps the reader to understand the problematic redemptive qualities that Dickens has granted to this river of filth. The river is the figurative birthplace of the novel s main character John Harmon and comes to represent the place of his return. In Our Mutual Friend, the Thames becomes a waste receptacle for the rotting corpses of London that have been forbidden a proper burial and instead left for the enterprising hands of waterside men like Gaffer. It is not the cause of waste production by both the upper and lower classes of London society, but instead serves as a cesspool of merging definitions of Self/Other as the individual loses subjectivity to become nothing more than a rotting pile of dead flesh. Death is the ultimate human shared experience because everybody dies, whether middleclass or poor. Dickens Thames is a place that is itself haunted by the dead. Dickens observes Old Betty as she hallucinates the forms of her dead children and dead grandchildren [...] waving their hands to her in solemn measure as they float down the Thames in a barge (Dickens 508). Despite its location as a place of death, the Thames also becomes a place of birth in the novel, thus making the distinction between death and resurrection an important element. The rebirth of John Harmon, as he emerges from the death-grip of the Thames, is an important metaphor for Dickens character. Since the novel is one that is rife with metaphors regarding the subjectivity of corpses, the fact that the river resurrects one is important. Harmon enters and exits the river as a dead body, despite the fact that he himself is very much alive. For all intents, the corpse 22

26 of Harmon is pulled from the river. Despite the existence of a corpse, the body of Harman is a living thing as he reinvents himself as Rokesmith and Handford. It could be interpreted as Harmon becoming a recycled product, with the corpse of one becoming the body used as a new identity. Dickens explores the importance of this resurrection, describing Harmon is terms both alive and dead. For Harmon, he observes that dead, I have found the true friends of my lifetime still as true, as tender, and as faithful as when I was alive (Dickens 372). As a result of being suspended between death and life, Harmon is able to learn what the dead could know, or do know [about] how the living use them (Dickens 373). Harmon pays attention to the fact that if [he] had come back, these noble creatures would have welcomed [him] wept over [him], given up everything to [him] with joy (Dickens 373). He observes that I did not come back, and they have passed unspoiled into my place (Dickens 373). It is here in the novel that the concept of Harmon s subjectivity becomes evident. Harmon chooses to rejoin the novel as a different person then he was before falling into the Thames. Dickens describes Harmon, at times, as encompassing these two bodies as both one and the same, in moments of surreal observation, as the present John Rokesmith, far removed from the late John Harmon, remained standing at a distance (Dickens 374). Harmon s rebirth from the Thames river causes him to become a detached and manipulative character as he embarks on the testing of Bella s character. He is not fully redeemed and resurrected until the conclusion of Our Mutual Friend, as the tricks and manipulative actions of both Harmon and Boffin are finally revealed. 23

27 Dickens ideas of what is and is not waste culminate with the return and redemption of John Harmon. For it is not only the juxtaposition and return of his body, but the redemption of character that is important to Dickens. The river, at least to Dickens in Our Mutual Friend, is a place that the principle characters must still go [and] face the worst of the river to claim their true identities (Gilbert 95). It is the location of the river and the misidentification of his corpse that cause Harmon to first lose his own identity. Harmon emerges from the waste and filth as someone else as a result of this self-conscious lose of original identity. It is this idea of the river as a place of rebirth out of waste that causes Harmon to reflect that there was no such thing as I as he brushes with death while drowning in the waters of this significant river (Dickens 369). While submerged in the river and struggling to live, there exists no sense of Other to play against Harmon s sense of Self, as he realizes that it is I who was struggling alone in the water (Dickens 370). This scene is the point at which Harmon is able to visualize his own subjectivity in direct relation to the idea of an Other. While not distinctly a human Other, the rebirth from the river seems to represent a place of subjective cognition, where Harmon is able to recognize his own rebirth of Self from this inhuman Other of the river (or womb). By saving himself, and gaining agency over his own subjectivity; Harmon is resurrected from the disgusting waste water of the river with a gained knowledge of the definite boundaries between land and water [that match] the project of defining and defending clear boundaries of the self (Gilbert 96). The elemental qualities of the Thames and its location within the urban landscape of a city that Dickens saw as rotting from the inside outward 24

28 becomes important to the concept of social unification between the novel s middle class and their relationship to the residuum. Harmon, seen in the terms of separation, is a problematic figure in Our Mutual Friend because the novel depicts him as a troubling figure of manipulation. I believe that the boundaries placed on Harmon following his resurrection from the Thames serve to place Harmon in a position of mad behavioral scientist or puppeteer. As a result of his resurrection from the river, Harmon emerges detached and removed from the other characters that he encounters. Since the audience is aware from the beginning of Harmon s purpose in manipulating Bella in order to discover if she is worthy of marriage, it separates Harmon from the other characters of the novel since the audience sees him as the manipulating element. The reader is able to see the self-fashioning that takes place as Harmon impresses his alter egos on others. It is a question of reader response as to what point in the novel the audience figures out that Harmon is Rokesmith. Dickens further complicates the idea of manipulation and its affect on the reading audience by keeping the actions of Boffin a secret until the novel s conclusion. The audience remains unaware that Boffin s miserly actions have been a charade, and as a result Boffin remains in close relation to the other characters he interacts with. It is the deception and manipulation of Boffin that contributes to the redemptive conclusion, more than the manipulation placed on Bella by Harmon. Boffin, at the novel s end, has redeemed himself from having dishonorably fallen from the high estate of his honest simplicity (Dickens 660). The audience has been shown the depth and manipulation that went into Boffin s 25

29 performance throughout Our Mutual Friend. The characters that remain living at the novel s conclusion return to their proper places. This successful attempt at subterfuge was Dickens purpose for the novel, attempting to complicate the likelihood that a class of readers and commentators would suppose that I was at great pains to conceal exactly what I was at great pains to suggest (Dickens 821). Just as Harmon has fooled Bella, and Boffin has manipulated the actions of Harmon, so Dickens manipulates the audience by playing on supposition. Humanity, specifically in relation to Our Mutual Friend and its version of the Thames, is defined and ultimately redeemed by its own waste. Since all of humanity will ultimately decay and die, their corpses become the means of both financial and elemental production. Whether rich or poor, mankind will find itself subject to being recycled in some capacity. To Dickens, the Thames serves as a symbol of the unification of society through its demolition of the boundaries of rich or poor, as it becomes unclear whose waste belongs to whom. By becoming involved with the removal and re-appropriation of our waste, civilization upsets the Victorian fascination with boundaries between filth and morality. The corpse becomes bones, its own specific form of waste production that eradicates a clear distinction between social hierarchies. The idea of bones, different then the concept of a corpse, eradicates this hierarchy by taking away an element of identification. There is no room for personal identity when encountering bones. The bones of humans are faceless and nameless remnants of life. This absence of humanity allows for the bones to become an emotionless product of waste. 26

30 Dickens seems to acknowledge this with the character of Mr. Venus, a man intent on the collection and reestablishment of skeletal remains. Mr. Venus, a member of the middle class, is seen in a more favorable light compared to that of Gaffer and Boffin. His intention to gather up the forgotten skeletal waste of London is presented as a noble endeavor, one removed from other waste-collecting professions. The skeleton is no longer identified in the abject terms that are given to a corpse. No longer a source of disgust, Mr. Venus is free to indulge in his professional endeavor as a bone collector. Mr. Venus, a few steps removed from the profession of a waterman or mudlark, sees the potential for treasure among the dust mounds that surround Boffin s residence. Venus notes that because of the treasure to be had in the appropriation of bones the dust heaps [were] surely never meant for nothing (Dickens 304). The scientific uses of the bones hints at the invading modernity of the nineteenth century. Venus and his career as an appropriater of bones successfully calls attention to the miscellanies of several human specimens through his labor (Dickens 496). Not only interested in the money that is made from the possessions of a corpse, Venus instead makes money off of the corpse itself. As Silas Wegg notes in conversation with Venus, you can t buy human flesh and blood in this country, sir; not alive you can t [...] then query, bone? (Dickens 297). Venus, the only character in Our Mutual Friend to do so, is successful in the resurrection of the corpse as a means to a financial end. This duality between the profession of Venus and the accusations made by Riderhood towards Gaffer s profession represent a conflict of interest for Dickens and his reading audience. While the 27

31 resurrection of Harmon is meant to be seen without satire, the professional commercialism that goes into both Venus and Gaffer s professions should be seen as being satirical of the Victorian economy. Dickens uses both characters to represent the satirical idea that society can easily exchange human bodies instead of money, therefore creating an exchange economy based on a product that is just as ridiculous as the exchange of money. While both Venus and Gaffer deal in death, and therefore have an interest in the creation of more dead bodies in order to boost their chances at financial gain, it is Gaffer and his association with the corpse itself (instead of the bones left behind) that dooms him to a tragic fate. In the tradition of other Dickens novels, the plots of both upper and lower class characters are placed side-by-side within the narrative. This serves as a strong way to present the dichotomous relationship that exists between these two classes of London civilization. For Dickens characters, the intermingling of social status is unified with the element of waste production in Our Mutual Friend. We are all the same, because we as humans have the ability to make our own waste, either through daily production or the final waste creation of death. The element of human waste, especially excrement, serves as the binding agent between the lower and upper class characters of the novel. According to the narrator, we turn up our eyes and say that we are all alike in death, and we might turn them down and work the saying out in this world (Dickens 514). The filth and dirt of London effects not just the slums, but the entire habitation of the city itself. The voice of the novel s narrator, likely meant to be Dickens himself, makes a plea for the lords and gentlemen and honorable boards to think hard on 28